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One of the great benefits of GP 2010 is the flexibility that you can build into the business process design. You can have quite literally “no controls” or lots of “checks and balances”. It’s really up to your business policy and vision of how you want to run your organization. Lets look at this diagram.
The concept behind this simple flow chart is to illustrate the checks and balances that you could design into your Purchase Order and Cheque Signing processes.
The green boxes represent GP functions and transactional entry screens. The red boxes represent “approval stages” in the process and the blue boxes represent some type of physical activity. Taking this further, the diagram demonstrates that, if desired, the cheque signing authority can literally sign Vendor related payment cheques blindly as no cheques can be presented without first going through each of the routines and tasks. The key features of GP 10 that can bring this all together are Workflows, Security, Roles and Integration. Let’s look at each of these features to see how it impacts this “PO to Cheque” process.
- Within GP,Workflows are the rules for an approval system. (Read more on the subject here)
- Security set up enforces who can do what on various documents and transactions. GP has a very sophisticated security model which can be tailored for groups of users or right down to an individual user.
- Roles, introduced in GP 9.0, are a set of pre-defined configurable, screens, reports, tasks, business rules etc, that can be linked to users of the ERP application. GP contains 32 roles out of the box. EG. CFO, AP Clerk,Warehouse Manager, Bookkeeper etc.
- Integration. One of the key advantages that define an ERP is “Integration among different functional areas to ensure proper communication, productivity and efficiency and preserving data integrity in one shared database”
So, signing cheques blindly, maybe not for you. However, can GP support you if you wanted to yes it can.
